Three Books.

 

As ever, my Christmas presents included a couple of books, and I bought more on my trip to London over the New Year.  And, as ever, the choices are eclectic, not limited to a single genre - the perils of a butteffly mind, probably, flitting from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason.  A glance at my unread pile (built up over the past year or so) reveals it includes a Nevile Shute classic (A Town like Alice); three Orwells in a collection of all his long fiction that I bought years ago but haven't got around to finishing yet; Moby Dick; David Copperfield; a history book about the break up of Eastern Europe, how and why it came about and its aftermath; and a thousand-odd pages of Olga Tokarczuk's epic The Books of Jacob (again, bought a year ago but still not started). So plenty to keep me going for the rest of this year, I think - and my Three Reads in a Month achieved  in January - the first time for years I've managed that! - unlikely to be repeated any time soon. 

So without further ado, let's review my January read.  Three different books, and all highly enjoyable (at least to me) and thoroughly recomended.  Of course, that's all subjective, but what the hell.

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First up: A History of Britain in Ten Enemies by Terry Deary.  I've seen his stuff in bookshops before but passed them by: primarily, he's a writer of history with a target audience of teenage schoolkids - his Horrible Histories series is very popular.  I actually enjoyed it very much: there were few things I hadn't come across before, except for some particularly unpleasant Viking torture and execution practices, but the book is very well written with plenty of humour.  The usual suspects are included in the list of enemies - the Vikings, the Romans, The Spanish Arrmada, the French and of course the Germans - as well as the Irish, who I had never really thought of as enemies (despite The Troubles), and the Americans, who are supposed to enjoy a Special Realtionship with us.  The Epilogue, how the past has led to the present British character, is in itself worth the book's cost in my view.   A fun read.

Salman Rushdie is a bit of a Marmite writer - love him or hate him, with no middle ground, an acquired taste - and one that thankfully I've acquired.  I've read his Booker Prize and Booker of Bookers winning Midnight's Children (well deserved on both counts) and the controversial Satanic Verses that left him in fear of his life and under protection for a decade - and I still can't understand quite why it upset the Muslim community as much as it clearly did. They are extraordinary books, mixing satire and fantasy, life and love and laughter, both Eastern and Western cultures. His short stories are similar.  I also read a collection of essays and speeches he has made about his craft, called Languages of Truth: 2001 - 2020 that was a fascinating glimpse into his inspirations and his beliefs. So when Victory City came out a couple of years ago it went straight onto my Must Buy list.  It was well worth the wait.  It's another fantastical story, set in India in the Middle Ages, and chronicles the magical founding of a city and empire, its rise, stagnation and eventual collapse, through a mythical epic poem written by the city's founder: a young girl acquired (for want of a better term) by a goddess who inhabits her body, leading to two hundred and fifty years of life.  It sounds weird, and it is, but Rushdie's quite extraordinary imagination and use of language brings it to life with a mix of humour and brutality.  Best book I've read for ages and I thorougly recommend it.

And last but not least, LBC journalist and presenter James O'Brien's critique of all things Brexit, How They Broke Britain. I freely admit I am biased, and nothing will ever convince me that the Referendum was a Good Idea and its result anything but a catastrophic error of judgement.  But the book is not only about that.  It details how a surprisingly small number of people, press barons, journalists and politicians, over an extended period of time used the tools of their trades to change (even pollute) the entire media and political landscape to satisfy their own beliefs and designs, largely for personal political and financial ends, with the entire electorate no more than pawns (or, in the Russian expression, "useful idiots") to achieve it.  The usual suspects are there, the likes of Cameron and Farage, Johnson and Murdoch, and the conclusion in each case, meticulously researched and presented with apparently unrelated incidents and stories linked together to present a coherent picture, perhaps for the first time,  explains the mess Britain now finds itself in. I expected to come away from the book angry and disgusted but I didn't: I was simply saddened that the system (I can't think of a better word) has been so devalued and broken by these individuals that it will take a generation or more to clean up the mess, while the perpetrators will get away, by and large, unpunished, their bank accounts both on and offshore swollen obscenely, while the NHS crumbles and the food banks proliferate as the economy crumbles and stagnates.  It is nothing less than a national tragedy.  Read the book and weep.

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And on that cheery note, I shall make myself a cup of coffee, and get back to this month's first read, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities - a more readable and accessible book than most of his stuff in my view.

Happy days.

On writing

 

So here we are.  New year, new goals, as I've written elsewhere.  And it's started pretty well. all things considered.  Spending the New Year break flat and cat sitting in London for my son helped: the solitude (not to mention a week indoors with a streaming cold) meant I could crack on and try to write something and read more than I usually can at home surrounded by kids and animals and other distractions.

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The writing was easier than it has been for a while, and led to a rage against social media in general and Facebook in particular that perhaps went on a bit too long (but what the hell - I was happy with it and it made the points I wanted to make) and a travelogue about the area of  London I was staying in.  Both went live on my blogs during January, together with a 2024 review/2025 plan that I wrote and published at the end of December. Very different subjects.... 

I had a comment from a friend who had read them asking me how I did it - and I really haven't a clue.  I think that's true of all writers - an idea presents itself and you run with it and see what comes out.  For me at least, there is no real planning, and sometimes little detailed research: I just have this fixed idea and start bashing away at the keyboard, and stop when it's finished. Ideas, points of view, words and complete sentences spew out faster than I can get them down (as a two fingered typist I'm not the fastest...), I review and re-write as I go along.  Add at least one picture that is (more or less) perinent to the subject matter as a header, and voila!  Job done. 

Stories are the same.  An idea arrives and I try to do something.  It's weird and I don't understand it at all.  The first book I wrote, way back in the early 90s, came about because I was bored at work.  It came to me fully formed while I was sitting at my desk, 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, my day's work essentially finished, the papers read, and little prospect of anything else coming to me that day.  How staring blankly at the office wall (no windows in our room) triggered my sub-conscious into thinking about an incident that had taken place in my life fifteen years before, then embellished it with a few more incidents, gave me a full list of characters and locations and even dialogue, is totally beyond my comprehension, but I got up from my desk, slung my jacket on and headed to Ryman's the stationers round the corner (it's closed now, but the office is still there with different tennants: my employer went bust a year later) , bought a couple of 100-page notebooks, went to my desk, and started writing.

It took me a month.  At the end of it, one book was full, the other half so, but the story was there in my scrawled hand-writing.  As ever, it had changed a bit as I went along, but it was complete.  And there it stayed, for years, gathering dust. When the company went bust, I decided to try and write some more, in between applying for jobs and getting rejected, simply to fill my days, and had a similar experience.  It was another memory trigger, of a little fishing village in Cornwall I had holidayed in several times during the 80s, the entire drive down there, beaches, even a specific flat we had rented.  I thought about my work life, the investment banking environment I had spent twenty odd years of my life in - how to mix them?  I started writing, a nightime drive across Bodmin Moor in a sports car - bang.  Again the idea came more or less fully formed and I went with it.  Not a book this time, but a short story, kind of a murder mystery-cum-ghost yarn.  I needed to do a little research about one location I used but that was 10 minutes on Google Maps (when I typed a revision several years later) but there it was: complete in a week or so concentrated scribbling in another notebook.  It went into the drawer of my desk with the book, and like that one didn't see the light of day for several years.  

It's the recurring theme. Another half a dozen shorts have poured out over the years, usually when I've been either unemployed or else addressing some kind of mental crisis (at least one, perhaps two, helped me get through a bout of post-COVID depression by exorcising some ghosts in my psyche).  Nowadays I write straight to the LibreOffice suite on my Beast, since that is now just as quick and easy as writing longhand in exercise books and then copying over (my handwriting is depressingly poor nowadays since the advent of emails and MS Office and I can hardly read it).  They are all gathered together in a single document on my hard driive.  The book is also now laboriously copied over, revised and revised again, and a third time, and exists as a separate document and PDF file.  I'm working on a memoir (and have been for at least 7 years) and tried to re-hash ten years and more of travel blogs into a travel book-cum-memoir but it was approaching a thousand pages and still growing when I realised that much of it was completely out of date and gave it up as a bad job and deleted it.  The source blogs are still there in the archive of my The World According to Travellin' Bob blog where they make more sense as a series of specific date/time experiences than collected into anything even vaguely narrative.

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And so it goes.  I can spend ages without a single word or thought popping out, then with no rhyme or reason a torrent pours out from some nether region of my brain.  I've tried disciplining myself to writing so many words a day, as a prompt, but it doesn't make a difference at all. I can't force it.  It just comes and goes, like good weather or indigestion.  Which is why, like it or not, I'll never be a professional writer (much as I would like that).  The lack of a publisher is another reason - and that, as much as anything, is down to my laziness or lack of confidence.  It's so hard to get any kind of a deal nowadays, publishing - at least the traditional variety - is so much a closed shop these days, no-one willing to take a punt on a first timer like me, and actually preparing a manuscript and punting it around publishers large and small and agencies reputable or otherwise, simply to get a pile of rejection slips simply doesn't seem worth the effort somehow. Self-publishing via Amazon/Kindle or similar is an alternative, but that has its own trials and tribulations, not least in the realms of publicity and marketing (neither of which I have a clue about).

So why do I do it?  What's the point?  Simply put, it's something I need to do.  It's scratching this mental itch that I can't ignore..  I enjoy doing it.  I enjoy reading the final result, and feel a staisfaction of a job well done.  It keeps me occupied when there is nothing watchable on the telly (all too often the case) or the weather is bad (ditto).  It keeps my aging brain active in a good and productive way that no amount of shopping or gardening or dog-walking ever will, It''s not about money - never has been and I know never will be..  And I'm fine with that.  I honestly believe my writing is better now, now readable, and I have certainly read stuff, some of it well rewarded and well liked, that in my opinion isn't as good - but of course, that's just my opinion.  The few people who have read my stuff are generally complimentary (but honest and critical too, when needed) but I know I'll never have a mass audience.

Am I wasting my time then? No, not as far as I'm concerned.  When you boil it all down to the basics, I honestly think most writers write for the same reasons as me - for themselves, and because they have a story to tell, something to say, a point to make - and only a very fortunate few make any money from doing so.  I'm not one of that number.

And I'm fine with that.  Money isn't the most important thing in my life, and never will be.

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This, like all my writing, Is a living document and I rarely know where it's going and how it will all end when I start - this post is a perfect case in point.  The entire thing was meant to be a reminder of what I published and announced on Facebook and Skype in January and a brief review of each of the three books I read during the month (and I have no idea the last time I did that!), but My Muse had other ideas and dumped this lot out onto the page instead). She's a capricious bitch not to be trusted, but it's ok.  I like the piece, and it gives me the chance to add another later with the book reviews.  Happy days.